Nanofabrica
3D printed adaptor component for Unispectral's NIR tuneable filter product.
Nanofabrica’s micro-level resolution 3D printing technology has been deployed by infrared inspection company Unispectral to produce an adapter component for a miniature spectral camera filter.
Unispectral, which was backed by Samsung in a $7.5m funding round in 2016, produces multi-purpose miniature cameras for the material detection, image segmentation and plant stress diagnosis and Near Infrared (NIR) tuneable filters for mobile phones.
NIR filters are also used in the automotive, medical, agricultural and industrial automation markets. But when embedded into mobile phones, they help to enable facial authentication, image enhancement and remote healthcare and, as a result of Unispectral’s adoption of Nanofabrica’s Digital Light Processing-based technology, comprises a mass additively manufactured adapter component.
This part was developed for the filter’s camera barrel and was required to be manufactured to 10-micron tolerances. Nanofabrica’s Tera 250 system not only facilitates the printing of parts to such precise tolerances - thanks in part to adaptive optics and sensors enabling an active feedback loop - but has also allowed Unispectral to avoid the time-consuming process of manufacturing tools for the traditional injection moulding process and gain increased flexibility in the design iteration phase of product development. Using Nanofabrica's 3D printing technology, the turnaround time for the production of several hundred of the adaptor components has been reduced from multiple months to six hours. The partners believe with this level of productivity, they may be able to additively manufacture millions of the adapter component every year.
Nanofabrica
“In the mobile phone market, we have, each year, very rapid changes and development so wee need to adapt quickly, iterate, adjust the design, and with the help of Nanofabrica’s technology, we are able to adapt rapidly to various camera model designs,” commented Unispectral CTO Peleg Levin. “Since we intend to embed our device in mobile phones, we are talking about millions of parts per year. We see that with Nanofabrica, we can reach these numbers easily.”
“We are excited about the results we have achieved with Unispectral,” added Jon Donner, CEO of Nanofabrica. “As we move forward, 3D printing will continue to be used as a replacement for traditional manufacturing technologies and this will continue to be focused on applications where the use of 3D printing reduces the time and cost of manufacturing as is the case with the Unispectral adaptor. 3D printing is no longer a technology that can only be used for one-offs or very short runs. The technology in general is now able to cater for mid-volume runs today and at Nanofabrica in particular where we focus on the production of micro-scale parts and components, we can obviously fit numerous products in a single build envelope, so we nudge into the area of mass high volume manufacturing very easily.
“It is our feeling that as a general rule of thumb, for 3D printing to be used as a rapid manufacturing technology for any given application, it will have to have demonstrate at a minimum a 10-fold improvement in cost and/or time savings to offset the cost and risk associated with changing over from a traditional manufacturing technology. For Unispectral this is absolutely the case, and proves that for them, 3D printing is a clear and efficient alternative to traditional manufacturing processes today.”
